Devon Ford - The Fall

Cal had to admit that he didn’t know. Hell, he barely knew the girl having only just met her.

“Louise,” Jake said as he checked the chamber of the Glock and worryingly found it charged with a reflective piece of brass before holstering it back under his arm, “can you understand me?” he said slowly as though talking to an infant or a non-English speaker. She stared at him without responding. The two men looked at each other and Jake shrugged.

“Could be something medical,” he said, “could be shock…”

“It’s like she’s sleepwalking,” Cal said, seeing an instant reaction to his words on Jake’s face.

“Wait here with her,” he said, turning on his heel and jogging toward the rest stop. He stopped at a vending machine and dug in his pocket for change, then stopped and—for the first time in his life—knowingly committed a crime. He put his heavy boot straight through the glass front, and used the barrel of his pistol to knock away the shards sticking out at sharp angles. He grabbed a handful of candy bars. Jogging back to the truck he spilled the contents of his arms onto the driver’s seat, unwrapped a candy bar and handed it tentatively to the girl.

“Eat something,” Jake said, “please?”

Almost zombie-like in her twitching movements she took the bar, but glanced back and forth between Cal and Jake as though she still tried to understand what had happened. She ate, small bites and slow chewing, taking tense minutes to finish it. Jake unwrapped another and handed it to her, this one going down in half the time.

“Where are we?” she asked in a small voice, finally.

Cal and Jake glanced at each other, the relief evident on both of their faces that she seemed to be coming out of whatever state she had lapsed into.

“Newark,” Jake said. Cal realized he didn’t know where Newark was.

“My bag,” Louise said quietly, looking left and right forlornly.

“You left it at the hotel, we had to run,” Cal told her.

“I need my bag,” she said again, “my insulin kit.”

Both men sagged with sudden understanding. In their flight from Manhattan in a wash of adrenaline, of the gunfights and the fear of bombs and mushroom clouds, they had run with the clothes on their backs. Realizing now that her blood sugar must have dropped dangerously low, but was masked by the adrenaline, and had fallen far beyond even low levels for normal behavior when she slept, Louise had fallen into a hypoglycemic state and woken up without the first clue where she was and what had happened.

As her faculties slowly returned, the sugar in the food being absorbed into her bloodstream, they filled her in on the events of the last few hours. She listened in silence, glancing between the two of them as they picked up the story from their own perspectives, until the events caught up to where they were now: tucked away from the main streets of Newark having caught a short sleep.

“We’ll find a pharmacy or something,” Cal reassured her, “first priority.”

But the first priority was now escaping. Muted crumping noises battled against the barely perceptible changes in air pressure, but the flashes of light on the eastern horizon was unmistakable. Cal instinctively looked up, sensing more than thinking that the explosions were falling from the sky rather than detonating at ground level, but he could see or hear no planes. As New York city on the far side of the distant river was ravaged first, the bombs then fell on the western side of the Hudson, and began dropping closer to them.

“Time to go,” Jake said, throwing himself behind the wheel and gunning the engine, “and let’s just hope there’s no more nukes coming.”

The dark-suited woman had taken a small break, swiping a keycard into the unmarked suite of secure offices in the building one floor up from the command center. She had showered, put on the same dark suit and pale blue blouse this time. Now that she smelled and felt clean, she took two more of the stimulant tablets she had been surviving on for two days and washed them down with water.

Walking out of the frosted glass doors she refused to wait for the elevator for a single floor and took the stairs. Whether it was quicker or not was irrelevant; she was not the kind of woman who could stand still. She strode straight back into the secure command center, bypassing the security station entirely as though they weren’t even there, and walked unchallenged onto the floor. She glanced around, saw that the old man had taken himself away, and asked for a report on what she had missed. The supervisor looked nervous, mostly because he had little to report seeing as she’d only been gone for about forty minutes.

“Bombing is underway,” he told her, trying to stick to the bare facts in case he annoyed her. “We are getting reports of successes for military camps, airfields, naval bases, infrastructure, emergency response…” He trailed away, not sure what else she wanted to hear.

She said nothing but lit another cigarette without taking her eyes off him.

“Good,” she said finally, putting the lighter back into a jacket pocket, “when will the second wave be ready?”

He swallowed, checking the information on his tablet even though he knew the answer. “Bombers are returning now, they should be refitted and refueled and back in the air in less than three hours.”

She turned to regard him coldly. She knew as well as he did that the inescapable laws of physics were just that: inescapable. Both of them knew that there was no way to get more planes in the air any faster, nor could anyone issue an order for an ICBM launch as the Americans had already proven their anti-ballistic weapons shield was more than operational. Their prototype nuclear submarine was sailing south in the Atlantic to take on more missiles, then it would be back to prowl the eastern seaboard. It was there primarily to prevent any other countries coming to the aid of the Americans, and their backup was already steaming toward them to complete the underwater shield.

Their carrier group, on the other side of the continent, was steaming eastwards to close the distance and increase their ‘play’ time. The net was pulling tight, the rest of the world still had no idea that they were responsible, and within twelve hours they would have boots on the ground other than their insurgency teams.

Every target which could offer them resistance, every military base which could slow the advance of their invasion, was being systematically destroyed state by state, and the population was being driven from the big cities on the coast where the survivors could be corralled, catalogued, and put to work.

The ministry had done their shady work, and had successfully puppeted the rogue Americans into taking out the leadership with the ability to counter-launch nuclear missiles, and with the president and the vice president both in the White House when it was obliterated by nuclear fire, their enemy had nobody available with the authority to order any such strike, even if they knew who to launch against.

Speaker of the house, Madeline Tanner, sat in the back of the lead Chevy Tahoe as it sped east. Her secret service detail of five men and one woman drove fast, nose to tail, with their lights flashing. Weaving through the sparse traffic like an angry black snake, the radio in the front seat barked to life and prompted them to slow.

“What’s going on?” Madeline asked as she leaned her head through. She wasn’t used to riding in the lead car, as they normally held her securely in the middle car with protection front and rear. The head of her team, Drew Briar, a former US Marine with more than enough experience of vehicle convoy ambushes, liked to mix it up and keep any potential threat guessing as to which car she was in. Leaning back to shout over the road noise, he answered her whilst keeping his eyes on the road. “We need to get off the highway, ma’am,” he told her, “got reports of aerial bombardments and need you away from population centers.”